In a silver halide color photographic material, it is well known that an exposed silver halide is used as an oxidizing agent and an oxidized aromatic primary amine type color developing agent reacts with a coupler to produce indophenol, indoaniline, indamine, azomethine, phenoxazine, phenazine or a dye relating to these to form a dye image. In such a photographic system, a subtractive process is used and a dye image is formed by yellow, magenta and cyan dyes.
Among these, a phenol or naphthol type coupler is commonly used for forming a cyan dye image. However, these couplers have an undesirable absorption in the green region and accordingly, they are involved in a serious problem that the color reproducibility is conspicuously reduced, which is in need of solution.
As a means for solving this problem, U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,728,598 and 4,873,183 and EP 0249453A2 have proposed heterocyclic compounds. However, these couplers carry a fatal problem such that the coupling activity is low. As a coupler capable of overcoming this problem, pyrroloazoles have been proposed in EP 491197A1, EP 488248 and EP 545300. These couplers are excellent in view of hue and coupling activity. However, the dyes produced from the couplers described in the above-described patents are not always satisfactory in the light fastness and, in particular, the light fastness is inferior in the low color density part. Also, a problem remains that the color density varies due to the fluctuation in the composition of the processing solution and accordingly, an improvement in practical use has been demanded.
Further, among the pyrrolotriazole type couplers, those having a halogen atom as a releasing group are bounded to a problem of generation of heat stains which seem to be ascribable to the decomposition of the coupler itself.